WWW.surveyz.com offers one of the most sophesticated Randomization mechanims in the Online Survey Applicaiton industry for minimizing Question Order Effects. Depending upon your requirements a variety of Randomization features and techniques are used. In this tutorial different techniques and methods of Randomization will be illustrated with examples.
Example 1: I want to randomly choose one question from
my survey and display it to the user. Further more, I want to divide my
survey into three(or any number) of sections and choose one question from
each section and display it to my respondents.
Solution :
Create all the different questions that you need. Do not worry about
ordering the questions since only one of them will be randomly picked.
Then go to the Survey Options tab on the main menu bar.
Find the Randomization box on the lower right portion
of the screen.
Click on the Randomly Select One Question option.
Randomization
Randomize All Questions in The Survey
Randomly Select One Question
This will Instruct the survey to randomly choose one question out
of the survey and display it
Now to divide the Survey into 3 (Or more sections).
On the EditSurvey icon in the survey builder, scroll down to the
Last Question of each of the sections and add a Page
Break there. A Page Break is nothing buy a
Branch to the next question.
You can add a page break by clicking on the
Icon on the Question.
Example 2: I want to randomize the order in which the
questions get displayed. I have an initial welcome question and then three
sets of questions (each with N questions) -- I would like to randomize
the order in which each of the question sets gets displayed.
Note, the order of the questions within each Question Set must be in order.
Solution :
Create all the Questions that you would need.
Make sure that your initial welcome questions is the first question
in the Survey
Create Page Breaks on the following locations:
First Question
Last Question of the first question set
Last Question of the second question set and so on ...
Then goto the Survey Options tab.
Find the Randomization box on the lower right portion
of the screen.
Click on the Randomize All Questions In the Survey
Option.
Randomization
Randomize All Questions in The Survey
Randomly Select One Question
This will enable Randomization in each "Section" -- A Section is defined
as a list of questions between two branch points
If you need a "Thank You Text Quesion" at the End of the survey create
a Single question at the end after the last question set.
Make sure you enable a Page Break after the last question in the question
set to the "Thank You " question or else your "Thank You" question will
also be included in the randomization and might not be in the End.
Example 3: Now let take this to the next level and impose one more restriction
on the above two problem statements. In both cases we had 3 Question Sets
that we either choose (1 of N) or we randomized the questions order. Now
we want to randomly pick only one of these question blocs and display
it to the respondent.
Solution :
Here is where we introduce the Random Question Type
Go ahead and create the survey and setup the randomization as described
in Example 1 or Example 2 which ever is the case
Please have a "Text Only" Quesiton before each question bloc (Maybe
explaining what the next question bloc is all about )
After this is done click on the "Random" link under
the "Survey Display Options" box on the EditSurvey tab (left side bottom
table).
Here choose the first questions of each of the question
blocs. ie the TextOnly questions that you added at the head of each
of the question blocks
You should have (in our case) three items to randomize here -- The
first questions of each of the three question blocks
After that close the Randomizer window
Now you should see a new "Randomizer" question added to your survey.
Make sure that the Randomizer is before the questions
it randomizes.
If you added the questions into the randomizer in ascending order
then it's location is auomatically set to be before the first question
it randomizes.
Now go ahead and create a Page Break on the "Text Only" question
to branch to the next question. This will enable the Engine to Jump
to the question and then Randomize the Block.